Latest news with #InsideHigherEducation
Yahoo
19-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
University of Findlay students possible targets of visa terminations
Apr. 18—FINDLAY — The U.S. State Department reportedly revoked visas from three international students studying at the University of Findlay, according to a report from Inside Higher Education. The University of Findlay students are among 1,500 foreign students and graduate workers identified in the report whose legal status is now in jeopardy. Inside Higher Education reports at least 41 international students studying at Ohio colleges and universities have seen their visas terminated since President Donald Trump's inauguration in January, though the exact number of students and graduate workers affected by the changes is unknown. Three hundred University of Findlay students are non-U.S. residents, accounting for roughly 8% of the private school's student population, according to the school's student diversity report. University of Findlay President Katherine Fell confirmed a "minimal number of possible visa terminations" in an email Monday to students and faculty, published by the student news outlet Pulse Media. In the email, Fell urged faculty and cabinet members to stay calm, contact the university's designated official and avoid physical confrontation with authorities should U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents come to the Findlay campus. A spokesperson for the university did not respond to an email from The Lima News to clarify how many students were affected and why the visas were terminated. The State Department declined to verify how many visas it had revoked in Ohio as well. "As the Secretary indicated, the Department revokes visas every day in order to secure America's borders and keep our communities safe — and will continue to do so," an unidentified State Department spokesperson said in an email. "Because the process is ongoing, the number of revocations is dynamic. The Department generally does not provide statistics on visa revocations." Inside Higher Education identified at least 41 foreign students in Ohio whose visas have been revoked at the following schools: —Bowling Green State University: 1 —Case Western Reserve University: 4 —Cleveland State University: 1 —Kent State University: 10 —The Ohio State University: 12 —University of Akron: 2 —University of Cincinnati: 1 —University of Findlay: 3 —University of Toledo: "A small number" —Walsh University: 4 —Xavier University: 1 —Youngstown State University: Unknown Reporters from the Cleveland Plain Dealer identified at least 56 students across 12 Ohio colleges and universities whose visas have been revoked, including an Indian student at The Ohio State University in Columbus who is suing the Trump administration. Spokespersons for Ohio Northern University and Bluffton University said in emails Thursday they are unaware of any students or alumni affected by visa revocations. Fifty-four international students are enrolled at Ohio Northern, accounting for 2% of the student population, while 12 non-U.S. residents attend Bluffton University, according to school diversity reports published online. There are no international students enrolled at The Ohio State University-Lima campus. A spokesperson for Rhodes State College did not return an email from The Lima News asking whether international students there have had their visas suspended. A spokesperson for the University of Northwestern Ohio declined to answer questions about whether any students there had seen their visas revoked. Three percent of UNOH students in 2020 were non-U.S. residents, according to the most recent data available on the school's website. "Due to privacy laws and federal regulations, the University of Northwestern Ohio cannot comment on the specific circumstances of any individual student case or the status of their I-20s or F-1 visas," Stephanie Malloy said. Featured Local Savings
Asia Times
18-04-2025
- Politics
- Asia Times
US-China tensions impact visa issuance for Chinese students
Rising geopolitical conflicts and trade wars are affecting people-to-people exchanges between the United States and China as Washington tightens its student visa issuance. Over the past month, the Trump administration has reportedly revoked visas of more than a thousand international students without providing concrete reasons. Some media reports said the move could be related to an executive order signed by US President Donald Trump in late January 2025 to probe into international students who had participated in pro-Palestinian protests on US campuses or published pro-Hamas posts on social media last year. Most of the international students who recently lost their visas come from China. The others are from India and Iran. According to Inside Higher Education, a specialist publication, as of April 16 at least 1,300 overseas students and recent graduates at more than 200 US i nstitutions had seen their 'legal status changed' in recent weeks. The University of California San Diego (UCSD) confirmed that 35 students have had their F-1 visas revoked, with one student being 'detained at the border, denied entry, and deported to their home country.' International students need F-1 visas to study in the US, or they will be deported. In an article, a Shandong-based Chinese columnist says the US government's recent revocation of international students' visas is a political campaign. He says the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services is now investigating many of those who published pro-Palestine social media posts or joined related protests. 'The US government's move may look like to be a crackdown on certain violations of regulations, but in fact, the government wants to create a chilling effect during a sensitive period,' the writer says, referring to the trade war. 'Targeting international students can please domestic hardliners and suppress large-scale protests.' He says it's ridiculous that an Indian student, who posted on Instagram a picture showing children in Gaza, was asked by Immigration officers to explain whether he has any connections to Hamas. He adds that this 'witch hunt' not only affects many top global talents but also hurts American universities' income. The South China Morning Post reported on April 17 that some Chinese parents who had planned to send their children to the US for education had changed their minds after learning that the US had revoked the visas of hundreds of international students. Citing a Shanghai-based study-abroad agent, the SCMP said some parents wanted their children to switch from Advanced Placement (AP) curriculum to International Baccalaureate (IB) or A-level. The AP curriculum is for applying to American universities, while the IB and A-level are for universities in Europe and the United Kingdom. On April 11, four Chinese students filed a lawsuit in California after the US government revoked the visas of at least 529 students, faculty members and researchers from 88 American universities. Clay Zhu, an attorney and managing partner at DeHeng Law Offices' Silicon Valley office who represents the plaintiffs, said 36 international students from 30 universities across the US had submitted written declarations to a local court over the weekend of April 12-13. Zhu said 31 are from the Chinese mainland, one from Taiwan, three from Iran and one from India. He added that the lawsuit is intended to protect the rights of all affected international students. A judge will issue a decision within a few days. On October 7, 2023, Hamas, a Palestinian nationalist Sunni Islamist political group, carried out a cross-border attack on Israeli communities, killing about 1,200 people and seizing 251 hostages. Israel launched a military action in the Gaza Strip, causing the deaths and injuries of tens of thousands of Palestinian people. Last year, many pro-Palestine students held protests on dozens of university campuses in the US. On January 29, Trump signed an Executive Order to combat anti-semitism. He said his 2019 Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism found that students faced anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on university and college campuses. He said that after Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023, Jewish students in the US have faced an unrelenting barrage of discrimination and harassment. On March 27, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US had revoked the visas of at least 300 foreign students. 'If you say you're coming not just to study but to participate in movements that vandalize universities, harass students, take over buildings and cause chaos, we're not giving you that visa,' said Rubio. On many occasions since October 2023, Beijing officials have criticized Israel's military action in Gaza and reaffirmed China's support for a Palestinian state. Many Chinese students in the US echoed Beijing's stance by posting pro-Palestine and pro-Hamas messages on their social media accounts and joining protests on campuses, but many of them now feel regret. On April 9, China's Ministry of Education released an overseas study alert urging Chinese students to assess security risks and raise their awareness of precautions if they consider studying in certain US states. On the same day, the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism said tourists should fully assess the risks of travelling to the US. Both warnings can be seen in the context of China's retaliatory measures against the Trump administration's 145% tariff on all Chinese goods. In 2024, there were about 1.1 million international students in the US. In the academic year 2023/24, the number of Chinese students in the US was 277,398, 4.2% down from 289,526 in 2022/23 or 25.5% down from the historical peak of 372,532 in 2019/2020, according to US Congressman Riley Moore on March 14 introduced the Stop Chinese Communist Prying by Vindicating Intellectual Safeguards in Academia Act (Stop CCP VISAs Act), saying that Chinese students have been caught in several cases spying on the US military or stealing advanced technology from American companies. 'Every year, we allow nearly 300,000 Chinese nationals to come to the US on student visas. We've invited the CCP to spy on our military, steal our intellectual property, and threaten national security,' Moore said. 'Congress needs to end China's exploitation of our student visa program. It's time we turn off the spigot and immediately ban all student visas going to Chinese nationals.' Moore's call came after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) last October charged five Chinese students, who were caught photographing joint US-Taiwan live-fire military exercises near a military site in Michigan. The alleged incident happened in August 2023. The five were accused of lying to investigators about their trip to Michigan and conspiring to delete photos from their phones. They graduated from the University of Michigan in spring 2023. They were enrolled in a joint program between the University of Michigan and Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. 'For decades, the failed post-Cold War consensus assumed China would democratize and liberalize if we welcomed them into our markets, media, and universities,' said US Senator Ashley Moody, who supports the Stop CCP VISAs Act. 'Instead, the CCP took advantage of Americans' goodwill and subversively exported agents to our shores to spy, oppress dissidents and enemies of the state, and steal publicly funded research and intellectual property to the tune of billions of dollars.' A Guangdong-based writer says that if the US forbids Chinese students from studying there, its universities will lose top students and huge incomes, as international students pay several times more than local students. Read: Xi to visit Southeast Asia amid China's grievous export crisis
Gulf Today
03-03-2025
- Politics
- Gulf Today
Is this what education in a democracy looks like?
Austin Sarat, Tribune News Service On Feb. 14, the Trump Administration sent a Valentine's Day shocker to American higher education and schools nationwide. The Department of Education sent them a mandate for a new educational orthodoxy, prescribing institutional policies at a level of detail seldom seen in this country. The Department of Education's 'Dear Colleague' letter, the vehicle through which its Office of Civil Rights communicates policy guidance, delivered a radical redefinition of what it calls 'the nondiscrimination obligations of schools and other entities that receive federal financial assistance from the United States Department of Education.' And, while claiming to take inspiration from the Supreme Court's 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which curtailed affirmative action in college admissions, the Dear Colleague letter goes well beyond that decision while also ignoring or pushing aside key elements of Chief Justice Roberts' majority opinion in that case. As an article in Inside Higher Education notes, 'It declared all race-conscious student programming, resources, and financial aid illegal over the weekend and threatened to investigate and rescind federal funding for any institution that does not comply within 14 days.' The letter 'mentions a wide range of university programs and policies that could be subject to an OCR investigation, including 'hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life.'' In the name of protecting civil rights, the Department of Education letter lays out a vision for education that is hardly democratic. It advances its version of what anti-racism in education looks like and leaves no room for dissent, disagreement, or diversity of views. Inside Higher Education was right to label the new Department of Education guidance 'sweeping and unprecedented.' It turns Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which the Dear Colleague cites as authority, on its head. Originally conceived as a tool to protect Black students and other people of color, Trump's Education Department wants to use it as a weapon to protect white individuals. What the Department of Education did is as much a political maneuver as a legal one. It stokes culture war battles. That is clear in its claim that 'educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon systemic and structural racism and advanced discriminatory policies and practices.' The Dear Colleague letter offered no evidence to support this familiar MAGA talking point, even as it accused educational institutions of 'smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline.' As Brian Rosenberg, former president of Macalester College, explains, the letter is 'truly dystopian' and, 'if enforced, would upend decades of established programs and initiatives to improve success and access for marginalized students,' reports Inside Higher Ed. As a result, it will stir up trouble for schools as they begin to dismantle programs that have been essential in making them hospitable for historically disadvantaged groups. That is one of its central goals. Recall that the Supreme Court did not flatly prohibit the targeted use of race in its affirmative action decision. Instead, it said that it would be subject to 'a daunting two-step examination known as 'strict scrutiny'...which asks first whether the racial classification is used to 'further compelling governmental interests... and second whether the government's use of race is 'narrowly tailored.'' The Court found that Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, the named defendants in the suit, 'fail to operate their race-based admissions programs in a manner that is 'sufficiently measurable to permit judicial (review)' under the rubric of strict scrutiny.' The Education Department directive went out of its way to make the 'daunting' strict scrutiny test virtually impossible for any school to pass. It pinpointed what it called 'nebulous concepts like racial balancing and diversity,' and stated flatly that they 'are not compelling interests.' In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Chief Justice left the door open for colleges and universities to pay attention to race in their admissions decisions. As Roberts put it, 'Nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected the applicant's life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.' 'A benefit to a student,' Roberts wrote, 'who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student's courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student's unique ability to contribute to the university.' The Dear Colleague letter forecloses even that possibility. As if addressing the Chief Justice directly, Trump's Department of Education said, '(R)ace-based decision making no matter the form remains impermissible. For example, a school may not use students' personal essays, writing samples, participation, and extracurriculars or other cues as a means of determining or predicting a student's race and favoring or disfavoring such students.' 'Relying on nonracial information as a proxy for race,' the department said, 'and making decisions based on that information violates the law.' Perhaps not surprisingly, the department preferred the approach that was laid out by Justice Clarence Thomas in the affirmative action case. Thomas did not think that the decision applied only to admissions. As he put it, 'All forms of discrimination based on race — including so-called affirmative action — are prohibited under the Constitution.' Thomas suggested that the Court's decision advanced what he called a 'broad equality idea.' And he insisted that the educational decisions of schools and colleges 'do not deserve deference.' The Department of Education's Dear Colleague letter agrees. It attacks academic freedom by forbidding universities from offering programming and curricula that 'teach students that certain racial groups bear unique moral burdens that others do not.' As the Boston Globe notes 'PEN America, a left-leaning free speech advocacy group,' sees the letter as 'part of a broader campaign to 'distort the law and bully educational and cultural institutions. In fact, it seeks to impose its own form of indoctrination on schools and colleges....'' Indoctrination and democracy do not go together, just like how the government should not tell colleges and universities what they may or may not teach. That is why colleges and universities need to push back in an organized way. They should use their collective power, mobilize alumni networks, and speak out rather than silently acquiescing.
